Steve Mills and his wife have one daughter. They previously owned two coffee/ice cream shops, currently operate an internet sales company and teach classes, but his primary job involves the paper industry worldwide. Hobbies and interests lie in gardening, photography, recorded music and of course, their pets.

eBay Chatter - Typos to shop victoriously?

With my typing abilities it is a constant fight to keep from having to re-type EVERYTHING. Luckily, many people have that problem. Luckily? At least for a sharp-eyed eBayer, looking for great buys.

If everyone wrote their listings in a program that constantly checked or even corrected their spelling, we might not be able to find as many deals, but they don't and therefore they put up titles that can't be found by the spelling B champion.

If you purposely put misspelled search words in the search bar, you are going to find listing that many miss. Steiff, Stieff, Steif, Stife could all sound the same but to a search engine they are night and day. Now you could do this manually but here is a site that will determine the most commonly misspelled versions of what you are looking for and then search eBay, http://www.fatfingers.com/ and the price is great, FREE!

Aptly named, it not only searches for common misspellings but also the misspellings that occur form poor typing skills like mine. You know, when your finger hits the key next to the one you meant, or both keys at the same time. You can use their drop-down box to search eBay.com or eBay in different countries. If you get too many results, you can refine the search to just Auctions, PayPal or Buy It Now or go back and refine your own search words.

Now why do you want to find the misspellings? Because you just reduced your competition for the item for which you are bidding. In extreme cases, you might be the only one! Usually I end up writing to the folks and letting them know they made a booboo, but I might not if it was on the Nikon D80 camera I want.

Here is another way we tell our students to use the same approach but this time from a sellers side. If you have extra space in your search title, purposely misspell the word to pick up extra buyers who might not know the correct spelling. If they do not know the 'i' comes after the 'e' in Steiff, they might miss the bulk of the listings and only find yours. Now you have cut down the selling competition.

Note: The nature of the Internet makes it impractical for our staff to review every comment. Please note that those who post comments on this website may do so using a screen name, which may or may not reflect a website user's actual name. Readers should be careful not to assign comments to real people who may have names similar to screen names. Refrain from obscenity in your comments, and to keep discussions civil, don't say anything in a way your grandmother would be ashamed to read.